


dream, while the innumerable choir of day (welcome the dawn)

by MathildaHilda



Series: What If; Red Dead Redemption Edition [1]
Category: Red Dead Redemption, Red Dead Redemption (Video Games)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Canon-Typical Violence, Chapter 3: Clemens Point (Red Dead Redemption 2), Hurt/very little comfort, Mission: "Blessed Are the Peacemakers", can you call it canonical character death?, hold on to your hats folks, okay so this is very sad, squint over these ships with me!
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-29
Updated: 2019-01-29
Packaged: 2019-10-18 19:37:01
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,881
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17587070
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MathildaHilda/pseuds/MathildaHilda
Summary: "He shoots him then; once, twice, thrice, until there’s a call from the bridge further aways and John is cursing loudly and Dutch pretends not to hear that other pitch in his other boy’s voice. Hosea takes his gun from his hand before he can shoot someone else already gone, but Dutch suspects that the other man now wishes to shoot something too."***Things go a little different.





	dream, while the innumerable choir of day (welcome the dawn)

**Author's Note:**

> I AM SO SORRY!
> 
> (Updated 5/2 with an added piece with Kieran!)

It’s just one day.  
  
Just. One. Goddamn. Day.

  
  
Even Bill is kicking the scraps of what's left of the O'Driscolls’; their corpses nothing but burnt-out husks and broken faces, and they're searching desperately in what remains of their holdout and Javier finds the cellar and doesn’t speak once he comes back up, his mouth shut and eyes telling stories they’d rather not know. John and Lenny scurry between the trees and call, because Dutch is a shell and only stares down at the last of the bodies, a gleeful smile on the dead man’s face.

He shoots him; once, twice, thrice, until there’s a call from the bridge further aways and John is cursing loudly, and Dutch pretends not to hear that other pitch in his other boy’s voice. Hosea takes his gun from his hand before he can shoot someone else already gone, but Dutch suspects that the other man now wishes to shoot something too.

  
It’s Lenny who finds him. It should've been anyone else. Just not young Lenny.

  
He's a mess; his nose is swollen three times its size, one eye is black and closed and the other is simply red; broken vessels making the pupil seem larger than it is, fingers twisted wrong, so much angry red against his equally red union suit, and he is so ghostly pale that his fate is nothing to discuss.

  
But Dutch, and don't forget Hosea and even John, is blinded in his relief and grief that he doesn’t see what's there until it isn’t, and Charles seems the only one brave enough to pull Dutch’s hand away.

  
Arthur Morgan's dead, but not to any disease or by Micah's deceiving nature; no, he's dead because he got caught in a trap and the O'Driscolls’ are now dead because of that trap. But Colm isn't, and that's good enough for Dutch, because he desperately wants to shoot  _something right now._

  
John's a twisted ball of rage and Hosea's quiet in his grief, but Dutch is  _ **loud**_ when he cradles his boy's head in his hands, closes his boy's eyes and curses an even stronger vengeance upon  _Colm Goddamn O'Driscoll._

  
It becomes Charles job to bury him, because the others have a ride ahead of them and Charles knew how to hide good and proper and there’s another shade of grief there that no one wants to discuss, and they can't leave Arthur alone. Kieran goes with him and Pearson almost packs up his things and leaves before Abigail fires off at him and makes him stay.

 

(He leaves, eventually, when they hide in a cave and all any of them sees are Dutch’s ghosts and every broken promise.

They don’t talk about how he plays chess with Hosea and discusses books with Arthur. Maybe they should, but by then Micah’s too wound around Dutch for anything to make much difference.)

  
   
They contemplate burying him next to camp, but somehow it doesn’t seem right and so Charles tells Kieran of a place they found while out scouting once; remote and beautiful and something that seemed a little like Arthur. Like something he’d want. They take him there and the women plant some flowers (except Sadie, because Sadie's murdering O'Driscolls' with her bare hands and is almost laughing while doing it; doesn’t matter if they wanted her along or not.), and Jack tries to find an outlet for the grief of a beloved uncle.

  

Charles writes, and Abigail composes, a letter to Missus Linton and gives her their sincere condolences and encloses the way to the grave, should she ever wish to visit. They don’t tell her what happened, and in the letter to Tacitus Kilgore in the weeks after she doesn’t ask, and neither of them sees Mary until John stumbles upon her almost ten years later, still dressed in black.

  
  
The others come back, no less broken and no less angry, and Dutch disappears for three days and comes back again, Arthur's weapons in his saddlebags and Arthur's horse hitched at the saddle, all courtesy of a Colm O'Driscoll.  
  
  
(Unofficially, the horse now belongs to Dutch and Hosea and maybe even John, but Tilly rides it into town more than once and eventually, once Bob falls to the Pinkertons' bullets, Sadie takes over and rides that horse until she reaches the South American border and has to let it go.

It grows old and weary, as all things do, but Sadie is reluctant with letting that final thing of one of her best men go. She even buries the damn thing with a marker, should she ever wish to go back North.)

Colm O'Driscoll is very much dead and it was violent enough that the law doesn’t know to thank them or hunt them down even harder, but either way; that's one more threat gone.

 

 

(Sean doesn’t die simply because he turned his back and Arthur wasn’t prepared to protect him; no, the poor kid dies just because he was there, in that town where nothing good could ever stay. 

There're very few O'Driscolls' left by the time Angelo Bronte sets his beady eyes on them with Jack gripped in greedy fingers and Saint Denis is just another stop along the way to freedom, so Kieran doesn't fall to them; doesn't ride into Shady Bell with his head in hands and his eyes ripped away. He rides out with them, robs a bank, and helps them hide away in the swamps of Lakay until the air is filled with hope again.

No; no O'Driscolls' find that poor boy.

Charles does, two days after they've taken Beaver Hollow, and he simply states at camp that he buried him by O'Creagh's Run and leaves it at that, even when Mary-Beth begs him to tell.

Dutch might've said, more than once, that there was no such thing as too much information; in this case, however, there was.)

 

 

Agent Milton finds them anyway, when Arthur’s tent is cold and empty except for the instances that Dutch has taken to sleeping there rather than next to Molly, and Sean’s not yet cold in the ground and he seems too content when he sees two less members and he most likely laughs when he leaves, just barely avoiding getting a bullet from Lenny. 

They burn down a house and John goes with Charles to fight thieving ghosts, and he supposes that a part of him wants the whole thing gone. He gets his son back and he wants something, for once in his life, with more than a passion, and he gets it; slowly, but surely, he gets it.

But there’s another bank, another funeral (which he misses, and he doesn’t yet know that he misses two), and then another train. There’s always a plan, he tells himself in Sisika, when the guard pokes him between the shoulder blades with the shovel and forces him to practically dig his own grave.

  
 

(He learns, later, when he sees Dutch disappear on The Count, that there never was a plan.

Maybe there’s never been a Goddamn plan.)

  
   
  
It’s Sadie that sees reason quite early, maybe earlier than Arthur would've, had he lived, and she sends Abigail away on a lawman's horse after Van Horn and back to Jack and Tilly, tells her to wipe them tears and stay strong until she comes back and rides off to fight Dutch, because Arthur was first and then was Hosea and now John, and there ain't no one left to keep him grounded and keep Sadie from going that extra mile herself.  
  
John comes back, shoulder bleeding and the pain from Arthur and everyone they’ve lost multiplied by five hundred as he stands there, hunched and broken as he yells his voice raw. Dutch left him to die, just as he left him to die weeks before, when Sisika ate him up from the inside and his hope was a hot air balloon and the idiocy of Missus Adler and Mister Smith. But idiocy and fleeting hope has always been something he’s been good at, so he doesn’t complain too much when they row across the waters.

  
 

Dutch left him to die, just as he had, and would have had this been such a story, left Arthur, and Dutch shouts and there are more bullets than there would’ve been, because this Dutch is raw and raged in ways he’d never otherwise be.

He’s betrayed and broken, just as he’d be if things were different, but the damage is a father’s grief and a lover’s wrath, and so there is so much more in those eyes now than before.

  
  
  
They shoot their way out and Bob and Old Boy fall and neither of them die on that mountain. Neither of them die watching a sunset or feel the pain of blade nor lead, but it’s damn near close enough. Sadie gets in a lucky shot, fells Micah Bell into the dirt and they don’t see him for eight years and when he comes back, Hell; he’s even uglier than before.  
  
Because he does come back, of course, because rats always do, and it just becomes one of them things; dead or alive, they're not all walking out of there.

  
 

(Sadie hands over a journal, pages worn and spine a little loose, thrusts it into his hands and he doesn’t know whether to cry or laugh; he’d always wondered what Arthur kept in there, he’d just never thought he’d ever read it. She leaves him some maps too, should the money ever run out, and now he does laugh, because she’s a little bit like Arthur, although none of them ever say it.

He finds a hat, worn and patched, right next to the chest, and he tucks it in the folds of his coat and stuffs it down his saddlebag when Rachel comes through the snow. He gives it to Jack, makes him promise not to lose it, and smiles for his brother for the first time in a very long while.)

 

 

Dutch sees reason for the first time since Arthur fell among the trees and Hosea on the cobblestones and he leaves them there in the snow and cold and John doesn’t see him until they meet again, years later. And even then, with his gun trained and all the reasons why he does this in his head, he’s not quite sure if it’s Dutch he meets. He’s not quite sure if it’s the man who raised him and Arthur, or if it’s just another monster in the books Jack has come to read.

 

But it always was a Goddamn mountain, he thinks more than once before Ross knocks him down; Abigail and Jack gone and the same with Sadie and Charles.

(And Uncle, but he leans on the porch and doesn’t see.)

There’s always a Goddamn mountain, where this starts and ends, and no matter how far up you climb, the stones are there to bring you back down.  
  
He begs forgiveness that he didn’t do more and that he wasn't the one to gun down Colm O'Driscoll when he turned tail and ran like a Goddamn coward through the woods, but he ain't so sure Arthur'd care much who shot who;

  
He'd still be pretty pissed that John was dead too.

**Author's Note:**

> Soooo; my only excuse for writing this thing is that I was replaying the game, fucked up and got Arthur killed when I tried to escape the O'Driscolls in the chapter 3 mission "Blessed are the Peacemakers", and the damn thing wouldn't leave my head!
> 
> Title from; Nightingales by Robert Bridges
> 
> "Beautiful must be the mountains whence ye come,  
> And bright in the fruitful valleys the streams, wherefrom  
> Ye learn your song:  
> Where are those starry woods? O might I wander there,  
> Among the flowers, which in that heavenly air  
> Bloom the year long!  
> Nay, barren are those mountains and spent the streams:  
> Our song is the voice of desire, that haunts our dreams,  
> A throe of the heart,  
> Whose pining visions dim, forbidden hopes profound,  
> No dying cadence nor long sigh can sound,  
> For all our art.  
> Alone, aloud in the raptured ear of men  
> We pour our dark nocturnal secret; and then,  
> As night is withdrawn  
> From these sweet-springing meads and bursting boughs of May,  
> Dream, while the innumerable choir of day  
> Welcome the dawn."


End file.
